Author: John Doherty

If there is one term in the tech/entrepreneurship world that makes me grate my teeth (more than my TMJ already does), it’s the term “lifestyle business”. SEE? Didn’t that just make you shiver and want to punch someone at the same time? I severely dislike this term, which is often used when comparing a business […]

I’m building my company Credo on WordPress these days. I recently overhauled my business model, moving from a commission-based model (which is a nightmare to track and a “business model” built on hope not business) to a subscription SaaS model.

Because I’ve been building on Credo on WordPress since the beginning, I have a decent bit of architecture in place already. I’ve been using Gravity Forms as my lead capture solution, and as I was building out the new version of Credo I was able to implement (with the help of a fantastic developer I found) a lot of functionality that I’ve needed, such as one form across all of the profiles on the site. Read more about GravityView is Major WordPress ? …

Too many of us live our lives in fear of failing. While some have a fear of flying, I think that once you’ve been through some great successes you no longer fear doing too well. The goal becomes to also be okay with the opposite – failure.

Anyone who is driven and wants to succeed must come up against this. It’s easy to stay in the known and optimize towards a 3-4% better conversion rate, but what happens when you want to 10x your business in the next few months? You won’t get there by doing tiny changes that get you .25% better (unless you are building off a huge base already). You have to change your mindset. Read more about On Being Willing To Fail …

There are many perks to running your own business, and mine specifically lets me work with amazing marketers and entrepreneurs who can run their businesses from anywhere in the world. I’ve read so many books about remote working and how to set up a business that allows this. Books like The Four Hour Workweek and Vagabonding have inspired me while websites like NomadList.com keep me constantly dreaming. Even Facebook marketers are targeting me about traveling the world and working. Read more about CredoCamp – Lessons Learned Working Remotely …

I love architecture. Part of the reason why I worked in rentals/real estate for a while was so that I could look at photos of beautiful apartments and houses all day while pretending to do work. I’m kidding about the pretending to do work part (mostly).

Houses mystify and excite me. My wife and I are thinking about building a house in the next couple of years, yet we have absolutely no idea where to start. Do we find an architect first? Should we buy land now or later? What about plumbing and electricity – how do we know how to set that up if we’re not in a development? We know where we want to end up – with a beautiful mid-century modern home in a beautiful setting – but how do we get there?

The Internet is littered with side projects that never received the attention they could have and thus never took off like they might have. I love side hustle post-mortems and stories of serendipitous things that happen because of them. Others have written on this topic, so now it’s my turn.

I would bet that every entrepreneur’s journey is full of these, and mine is no different. I’ve set out with big intentions to launch communities in a couple different areas I’m interested in (outdoors gear and cycling), bought a site to use as my home base as a nomadic marketing consultant (which never materialized), started writing an ebook about marketing that I never finished (but built a big email list for), and more. Each of these “failed projects” taught me something different that was valuable. In fact, I’ve come to think of each of mine as failed startups and now count them as part of my journey to finally having a business that could succeed.

Back when I started in the digital marketing space in 2009, RSS feeds were all the rage. Before that, I started blogging around 2003/2004 and when RSS became popular it was hands down the best way to spread your content online. I remember focusing so hard on that RSS subscribers number because that was the way you built an audience and could get your content to them. Remember, this was before Twitter even existed and when Facebook was still in its very nascent stages (I still can’t believe I have been on Facebook for almost 12 years as of this year).

Sometimes in life we know that something needs to change, but we keep putting it off until it becomes big enough of an issue to force our hand and cause a change. For years, I’ve been wanting to move my sites off of the disparate cheap shared hosting where they previously lived and onto WPengine for a long time.

In the last few months of 2015 I realized that my livelihood moving forward, as long as I work for myself, is all going to come through my own channels. I have become convinced over the years, after seeing slow and fast sites, of the importance of speed for websites. While it often won’t help smaller sites from an organic perspective, on very big websites with millions of pages you can see a lot of improvement in both traffic and conversions by speeding up your sites.

All of my sites are on WordPress at this point because of the easy extendability of the open source platform. I began my career online developing on the Joomla platform and still remember looking at plugins that supported SEO friendly (SEF is what they called them) URLs. While Joomla worked fine for what I needed at the time, WordPress has moved ahead of them leaps and bounds so basically all my websites have been exclusively WordPress since 2011. I tried building out a few sites with other providers (SquareSpace, Shopify, etc) but they didn’t really suit my needs as someone with a web developer background who wants the freedom to extend things as I wish.

I’m sick of SEO packages. You know the kind, where you get an email asking you to send them a proposal for what you would do for their company and what your packages and pricing are. I’m tired of companies that offer things like “10 blog posts for $150.”

Why?

This is old school small scale thinking. If you want 10 blog posts for $150 and your hourly rate is $30 per hour, write a blog post every 30 minutes for 5 hours. I bet the quality will be a lot higher than paying someone random to do it for you. Marketing “packages” don’t work. Marketing that works isn’t a product that is plug and play for every business. Depending on your business and who your customers are, and your current stage of company, different channels are going to work better or worse for you to actually get you results.

I’ll give a lot of businesses asking for packages the benefit of the doubt because they don’t know what else to call them, but the language underlying it signals to me that they view marketing consulting as transactional – I give you this and I get that. I’m sorry, but that’s not how marketing works. That’s not even how business works! If business were that easy, everyone would run their own business.

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Hi I'm John Doherty, the founder of Credo and author of this blog. I am an entrepreneur and growth marketer based in Denver Colorado (though often traveling the world), where I live with my wife and our very large black labrador Butterbean.